5 reasons why I take a week off
every quarter

I just came back from five days at a countryside lodge with my wife, daughter, and dog.

I’ll be honest with you: this time I struggled to switch off. I have multiple exciting projects on the go and it felt a little forced. But I did it anyway, because I know it’s necessary. I take this kind of intentional break every quarter, and here’s why.

1. To go higher

When we stay in the same routines, the same locations, the same environments, meeting the same people, our thinking narrows. We start operating from the same level of consciousness we always have, and as Einstein put it, you cannot solve your problems with the same level of thinking you used to create them.

The consequence of not addressing this is a life lived on autopilot, recycling the same ideas, the same blind spots, the same ceiling. We stay busy, but we don’t actually move forward in the ways that matter most.

For me, taking a week away disrupts those patterns in the best possible way. I let myself be bored and relaxed, not trying to solve anything, not chasing the next insight. And that’s exactly when fresh thinking arrives. I come back with renewed energy, clearer perspective, and ideas I could not have accessed from inside the busyness. Going higher means rising to a higher level of awareness, and sometimes the only way up is to step back first.

2. Recovery

I always share this with my clients: we, as leaders in multiple areas of life, must think of ourselves as athletes. We are in the arena, and in the arena we get battered. We lose deals, face challenges, people let us down, and things go wrong more often than we’d like to admit. That’s just the reality of being in the game.

The problem is that without recovery, an athlete in the arena does not perform at their greatest. And yet most leaders treat recovery as a reward they haven’t yet earned, rather than a non-negotiable part of elite performance. Over time, that catches up with you.

For me, this week looked like sleeping well, doing nothing, walking in the woods, and meditating outside with the birds. Mental recovery allows the mind to recalibrate, to find clarity in the chaos, and to restore alignment in a world that can feel increasingly complex. Whether you’re running a marathon or a 100m sprint, you need to peak at the right time. Recovery is how that happens.

3. Have fun and enjoy the present

I very easily fall into the trap of taking life too seriously. And I’m not dismissing the real responsibilities many of us carry: school fees, sales targets, decisions that affect other people’s lives. That weight is real.

But here’s what I’ve had to confront: seriousness leads to heaviness, and heavy energy isn’t creative. If you continued operating from this state indefinitely, where would it lead you? The Dalai Lama captured it better than I ever could: “man sacrifices his health to make money, then sacrifices money to recover his health, and then is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present, and in the end he has never really lived.“

At the end of my life, I think I’d regret not being more present, not enjoying the ride a little more. So I’m actively choosing to bring that energy into the here and now. My own experience has shown me, again and again, that I perform better, lead more powerfully, and create better results when I’m genuinely having fun.

4. Increase my value

This one sounds counterintuitive. How am I being valuable when I’m meditating in a forest?

Here’s the thing my clients pay me for: my state of being. Not so much what I do, but who I am when I show up. In an AI world where the doing is increasingly being automated, the ones who understand this will be the ones who survive in the next era of reinvention.

AI can hold coaching conversations these days. It can produce powerful analysis and polished presentations, the kind of work I was paid to do as a management consultant. But it can’t replace my presence and authentic energy. It can’t pick up on what’s not being said in a coaching call. It can’t feel the energy in a room, or access the kind of intuition that tells me exactly where to go in a session. That’s what I’m leaning into, and that’s precisely what taking a week away protects and sharpens.

5. Less reactive, more creative

There’s a distinction I come back to again and again in my book and in my coaching: the difference between the Reactor and the Creator.

The Reactor is tossed by the waves. Their emotional state is dictated by what’s happening outside of them, and so they live in a permanent state of response, chasing fires, managing noise, never quite getting ahead of it. It’s an exhausting way to lead.

The Creator still faces the same challenges, but they’ve learned to slow their mind just long enough to find the space between stimulus and response, and within that space lies the power to choose. To create consciously, rather than react automatically.

The trap we all fall into is this: the more immersed we are in the doing, the more we drift toward the Reactor end of the spectrum without even noticing. A week away is one of the most powerful ways I’ve found to return to the Creator. Not through discipline or strategy, but through space. Through rest. Through allowing the mind to settle so that I can lead from within rather than from the pressure of what’s happening around me.

Reflection: When did you last give yourself real space, and what’s the story you’re telling yourself about why you can’t?

Wishing you a great week ahead!

J